As service providers increasingly host their web services (e.g., web sites) at third party data centers in the cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Sites, security and key management for these web services hosted at the third party data centers has become an important issue. The crypto operations such as RSA, encryption and decryption operations required for secured communications with these web services consume a lot of CPU cycles and computing resources at the servers hosting the web services and are preferred to be offloaded to a separate module dedicated to that purpose.
Hardware security modules (HSMs) are physical computing devices that safeguard and manage keys for strong authentication and provide crypto processing capabilities. Each HSM traditionally comes in the form of a plug-in card or an external device that attaches directly to a computer or network server to offload key management and crypto operations from the server. However, hardware offloading is not always available especially for the web services hosted at third party data centers because most servers at the data centers do not have hardware RSA accelerators. In addition, some hypervisor products for running virtual machines on the servers, such as vSphere by VMWare and Hyper-V by Microsoft, do not support non-networking single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), which enables a device to separate access to its resources among various Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) Express (PCIe) hardware functions, and thus making them very difficult to provide hardware offloading for crypto operations. Therefore, there is a need for an improved system and method to provide secured key management for cloud-based web services hosted at a third party data center via HSMs.
The foregoing examples of the related art and limitations related therewith are intended to be illustrative and not exclusive. Other limitations of the related art will become apparent upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings.